Peter Bromhead: Identifying cliches

Cartoon / Peter Bromhead

After studying the Washington Post's latest list of journalism cliches, I'm now wondering how I'll ever be able to string two sentences together again.

Identifying cliches is apparently a popular game in Washington, particularly among those sophisticated intellectuals who read uppity newspapers.

The latest list decrees that "Orwellian" and "Machiavellian" are terms that any self-respecting journalist should avoid.

I could curtail my use of "Machiavellian", but deleting "Orwellian" presents a difficulty in today's security obsessed world, where government agencies now possess carte blanche for electronic snooping.

What other adjective describes the alarming parallels to Orwell's dystopian concept?

Like most lazy hacks, I turned to my computer's thesaurus to come up with alternatives. But if you type in "Orwellian", you draw a blank.

According to Wikipedia: "'Orwellian' connotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation and denial of truth."

Surely, this is uncomfortably close to what Edward Snowden has been suggesting in his revelations about the "Five Eyes" international security alliance, of which New Zealand is a member.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949. He wrote most of the novel on the Scottish island of Jura, in 1947 and 1948.

It's a part of Scotland I know well. In the 1940s it would have been hard to find a hand-cranked party-line telephone on the island, and if it happened to be the Sabbath, even that primitive communication service would have been closed.

How Orwell dreamed up a future world where photographs are easily doctored (think Photoshop) or people have no privacy because of two-way tele-screens (think of the relentless march of portable digital devices) is remarkable.

The author is rightly honoured as the originator of many terms familiar in today's language, such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "memory hole".

But the term "Orwellian" was coined by author Mary McCarthy in the early 50s and rapidly became a descriptive tool used by the media.

Now Washington pundits have declared "Orwellian" to be a cliche, so journalists had better stay clear of it.

Hang on a minute. Who are these mysterious, smart-arse people in the US capital who've decreed this?

Maybe it's the secretive Thought Police at work again, trying to get a descriptive but embarrassing adjective that sums up blatant intrusions into privacy, subtly erased down a memory hole.